“People get bored, persons get headaches. Computer systems do not,” claimed Bill Herr, a lawyer who used to perform for any chemical provider.
When 5 television studios became entangled inside a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the price was immense. As portion on the obscure project of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a expenditure of more than $2.2 million,
Office 2007 Ultimate Serial Key, much of it to pay to get a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates. Smarter Than You Think
Articles in this series,
Office 2007 Pro Plus Serial, appearing in The New York Times in the coming months, will examine the recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and their potential impact on society.Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
“It’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential,” stated Elizabeth Charnock, founder of Cataphora, an information-sifting business.
But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents within a fraction on the time for the fraction of your price. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto,
Microsoft Office 2007 Serial Key, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.
Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.
“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of men and women who applied to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” mentioned Bill Herr, who as a attorney at a major chemical firm made use of to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “Men and women get bored,
Office 2010 Home And Business, people get headaches. Pcs don’t.”
Computer systems are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming perform once done by consumers in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the get the job done once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.
Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.
David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom in the economic pyramid,
Office 2007 Enterprise, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.
“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor explained. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”
Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.
“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman from the machine learning division at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from personal computers that can’t understand language to a point where pcs can understand quite a bit about language.”
Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.
E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”
The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”
The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting small business based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of men and women — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.
Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.
For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.
“It doesn’t use keywords at all,” claimed Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder. “But it’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of customers.”